Free Filaria by Brent Hayward

tubular structure — imaginatively known in Hoffmann City as the tube — stretching up from water to ceiling. Within this tube, they said, lived the god of all gods. Or was a passageway to the god of all gods. So they said.
    “You sure it’s that way?” Tran so Phengh asked.
    “Yeth.” If a crab could sound despondent, this one did.
    Beginning to pole away from the beach — using the slat he had previously claimed — Tran so pushed the raft through flotsam, which piled under the blunt nose of the craft and spilled to the sides. He shoved larger pieces away. Behind, the wake of open water quickly closed in again. His familiar spot on the beach slipped away.
    Some of the vessels they passed showed evidence of ownership; a tiny man, slumped in an equally tiny canoe, watched Tran so pole by. More dead than alive, skin blistered with growths, like fish roe. The black eyes followed.
    On another raft, two thin men jerked each other off.
    Tran so nodded cursory greetings. His gesture was not acknowledged.
    Soon the water was too deep for the slat to touch bottom, but Tran so was still able to maneuver his raft, pushing off the assortment of floating or submerged obstacles. Before much longer, they were out on the open lake, bobbing under the dim lights of the ceiling, negotiating wrecks and huge, floating masses of flora that looked like worn brown carpets. Dried flotation bulbs of these growths provided more than a day of delirium and feverish sexual appetites, memories of which forced Tran so to painfully recall his wife’s lost passion; now, Minnie sue’s body had withered to nothing more than a frail, hot skeleton, housing a blackened heart. A heart kept beating long after everything else had died.
    Shuddering, Tran so Phengh looked over his shoulder, as if he might see his wife as she once had been, perhaps waving from the beach, but it was only Hoffmann City, sprawling as far as he could see, masses of shacks and lean-tos and communal housing disappearing into the haze. A fire burned somewhere in the whores’ district. Smoke hung over the quartier, rising slowly, forming a vortex whose peak rose, whirling, to be sucked up into a massive vent. Was the smoke coming from a pyre, he wondered, where diseased bodies of the dead burned, or had atheists struck again, an act of terrorism in the faces of the many gods?
    Above the city, up near the ceiling, skirting the funnel of smoke, circled a small group of what appeared to be some form of aerial creature. Perhaps an unfamiliar deity? Though these entities were remote, Tran so Phengh was sure he had never seen their likeness before. Perhaps they were gods called in from another city to try to extinguish the conflagration, searching for the cause of the disaster? Though Tran so did not condone violent acts of defiance — for innocent people had died in previous explosions, and more than enough death crawled Hoffmann City — there had been many times since Minnie sue had become sick when he’d thought that perhaps destruction of the world would be best.
    He sighed.
    Not often had he been so far from the shore before. The air actually smelled a little like he remembered air smelling when he was a child. As he looked down at the crab, it immediately ceased its futile attempt at escape.
    “We going the right way?”
    Muttering a curse, the crab pointed its claw in the direction they were heading.
    “How deep is the water here?”
    “Me swim? Come back? Tell man?”
    Smiling, Tran so shook his head. To starboard, a bloated corpse floated facedown in the water. A man. Tran so sang a song under his breath, one he had not sung in ages, a song from his youth, and he pushed at the corpse with his stick; pustuled flesh fell loosely off the yellow bones.
    The crab, meanwhile, splashed noisily from the recess in the deck; Tran so pulled up the net.
    “Here god. Let swim? Let free?”
    Tran so shook his head again. “Not yet.” With his knife, he cut a length of fishing line,